Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 November 2008
About seventeen years ago when my eldest daughter was a student in the third grade of elementary school, she came home one day with a grade of “D” on an English assignment. Because I have been, in part at least, a language teacher most of my adult life, and because my daughter was a particularly verbal child, I was a bit distressed at the grade. I looked over her paper and was unable, in my ignorance, to detect what in it had induced her teacher to give her a grad of “D”.